Bill validators are used in various fields including automatic vending machines, ticket venders, automatic money deposition machines and so forth. The fundamental techniques for validation of bills or bank notes are mainly divided into optical and magnetic validation methods. In the optical validation method, photosensors are utilized to measure an amount of light reflected on a surface of a bill or permeated through a bill so that dimensions and printed conditions of the bill are represented by electric signals from the photosensors in order to decide authenticity of the bill. Also, in the magnetic validation method, magnetic sensors are employed to measure magnetic characteristics of the bill for judgment of the authenticity. There are some cases of adopting a stricter combined method of the optical and magnetic validation as occasion demand.
For example, Japanese Patent Disclosure No. 60-77287 shows a bill handling apparatus which includes a bill conveyor device and a magnetic head for bill validation; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,628,194 teaches a bill validator with optical and magnetic sensors.
under current heavy international traffic, there are many cases that require bills to be exchanged between local and foreign money. If exchanged money includes counterfeit bills, unexpected troubles would occur with owners of the money in good faith. Accordingly, at the time of finding out such fake notes, it is convenient to identify or confirm a banking facility or exchanger agency who exchanged the bills before. However, it in fact is quite difficult at present to record all symbols or numbers printed on exchanged bills and to reserve these records at the banking facilities or exchanger agencies.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus for automatically recording on printing paper symbols printed on documents, removing the above mentioned defects in prior arts.